For Carolyn Jerz, who plays Viola in Prime Stage Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the Bard runs in her blood. “My dad is an English professor at Seton Hill University and he teaches a Shakespeare class,” she says. “So from a very young age he would just tell me whatever his students were learning in…
Looking forward to seeing this! Set in the colorful world of Portugal and enhanced by traditional Portuguese fado music, “Twelfth Night” follows Viola as she disguises herself as a page boy to find her twin brother, but finds herself at the center of a love triangle, Prime Stage says. The oft-quoted line, “If music be…
I’ve never been all too keen on Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theories, and I find students often get distracted by their belief that the default way to get the “right answer” about literature is to look for connections between the author’s life and the author’s work. For example, I was disinterested in “Shakespeare in Love” because…
Trump spent the morning insulting the news media on Twitter, calling MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough a “Psycho” and musing about New York Times reporters getting “down on their knees” to apologize to him after his 2020 re-election victory. Around the same time the president was tapping out those tweets, White House Cabinet Secretary Bill McGinley, who…
“You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing,” asserted Dewey. He described a class where students handled wool and cotton. As they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing. Working in…
Meet the cast of Twelfth Night! (May 2-12, Prime Stage Theatre.) We asked Carolyn Jerz some questions about the show: Tell us a little bit about your character. Viola, a young noblewoman, finds herself alone in the land of Illyria after a shipwreck separates her from her twin brother Sebastian. She decides the safest plan is…
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Felt writey. Because reasons. The other day I walked through a room full of toddlers who were energetically growling at each other. They were obviously playing together, but there was a passion and an aggressiveness in their voices that made me feel that somehow, they weren’t just growling at each other, they were joining forces…
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This Lenten evening / Your orphaned feast occasioned / My penance haiku.
With an A-plot that comments on the Cold War arms race, a B-plot that tests LaForge’s command skills, and a C-plot that explores the Picard/Crusher dynamic, I wanted to like this episode more than I did. Yar wisely observes that it’s kind of pointless for the landing party to strategize against a system that has already wiped out all the intelligent life on a planet, yet the characters still peek through the bushes at the wobbly floating plastic menace, and leap out of the way of its space-zapper ray gun blasts, because TV.
It does take longer to evaluate student multimedia projects. I can understand the motive behind letting students do a shorter video or a longer audio project, but I’d rather let the students choose to go for depth or technical expertise, rather than automatically treating 10-15 minutes of video as if it’s the same as 45…
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2019 Pittsburgh Public Theater Shakespeare Monologue winner Carolyn Jerz of Greensburg cast as Viola (PITTSBURGH, PA – March 20, 2019) Prime Stage Theatre, a Pittsburgh theater organization that presents professionally produced plays based on works of classic and contemporary works of literature, will commence its 23rd consecutive season on a humorous note with one of…
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“Oklahoma! was greeted as jingoistic entertainment in 1943, perhaps in part because a wartime audience didn’t want to see that the musical’s celebration of the platonic ideal of Great America was qualified by a brutal acknowledgment of how cruelly America can fall short.” –Frank Rich
This fall, I’ve been asked to teach a Shakespeare class online. Here’s what Kevin Gannon wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education about moving an established course to cyberspace. As I looked at the class — an upper-level U.S. history seminar — and began to think about how I would teach it online, my heart…
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. In “Heart of Glory,” we get our first real exploration of Worf’s backstory, as the Enterprise-D rescues some Klingons who can’t convincingly explain what they were doing on a battle-scarred freighter. It’s a good Worf story, and the guest stars are sufficiently elegiac, sympathetic, and…
Like plenty of people my age, I grew up watching Sesame Street. As a parent of kids born in 1998 and 2002, the new-to-me dominance of Elmo was notable (and annoying) when I showed Sesame Street to my kids. We purchased a handful of videos and games, and regularly cycled through the videos and games…
During a department meeting today, I noticed I was feeling very disengaged. I was having trouble following what my colleges were saying, unless They were speaking one at a time They were projecting (no sotto voce or vocal fry) I could see their lips. I could usually get by with 2 of the 3, but…